Scholar Gipsy -Arnold

SCHOLAR GIPSY -ARNOLD

"Scholar Gipsy" is one of the most characteristic elaborate and popular lyrics of Arnold and belongs to that variety of lyrical poetry, which is technically known as "Pastoral Elegy". But "Scholar Gipsy" is not a pastoral elegy in its conventional sense. A pastoral elegy contains a lament for the dead. The poet mourns the death of a person in the garb of a shepherd and creates the setting of the pastoral life. But here the poet does not appear in the guise of a shepherd nor does he mourn the death of anyone. Only his friend appears in the guise of a shepherd in the first stanza and then we do not hear anything about him in the rest of the poem. But Arnold creates a pastoral or rural setting, which is not a figment of his imagination but is realistic and familiar. The entire landscape is in the vicinity of Oxford is vividly brought home to us, and it is made more beautiful and enchanting by the modifying colours of imagination. It is the imaginative vision of the countryside around Oxford. "The grand power of poetry", says Mathew Arnold, "is the power of so dealing with things so as to awaken in us a wonderfully full, new, and intimate sense of them, and of our relations with them." Here M. Arnold's theory of poetry agrees with his practice of it : "The Scholar Gipsy" has laid a spell upon an English landscape and made it an enchanted country. Green muffled cumner hills and sloping pastures bright with sunshine and flowers, stripling Thames at Bab-Iock -hithe, with pleasure boats, Wychwood bowers bright with flowers, the Fyfield elm where maidens dance in May, flooded fields, the causeway and the wooden bridge, Bagley Wood where gipsies pitch their tents, sparkling Thames and Godstow Bridge, abandoned lasher where rustics bathe, constitute a real landscape around Oxford, made lovely with the magic touch, of poet's imagination. It forms an ideal setting for the spiritual presence of the Scholar Gipsy. His unknown whereabouts and reports about his occasional vision create a sense of wonder and mystery. "Scholar Gipsy" is an elegy not because it commemorates an individual but because it is serious, reflective and melancholy in its tone and casts a longing, lingering look behind to the ideals embodied in the person of the Scholar Gipsy and to the happy age in which he flourished, when "life ran gaily like the sparkling Thames. There is a wistful craving for those virtues, which have conferred upon the Scholar Gipsy a sort of perpetual youthfulness and have exempted him from aging and death. His singleness of purpose, his wholehearted dedication to an ideal and undying hope that the realization would come, stand in sharp contrast to the "sick hurry and divided aims" of the moderns. The members of the modern generation have no fixity of aims and purpose. They fritter away their energy on a thousand things. They are also pursuing something they know not what. They are also waiting for their moment of success or realization but it delays. There is nothing positive in ways of their life. Modern man is perplexed, distracted devoid of hope and full of doubt.